Ticking, Talking Time

You’ve possible heard that women have a clock, a fertility clock, that rings an alarm when a girl’s just got to get pregnant. The urge can be fairly life changing. The pressure of peers having babies certainly adds weight to the biological framework, but ultimately this is psychological, and most men are not aware of the pressure they will experience. Well, some women really get quiet frustrated at one point in their life to have children and can make sudden life style changes when they realize the men they are with don’t want or never intent to have children. Here is an excerpt from a website:

“Kay Shubach always assumed she would be a mother. “I just took it as an absolute given,” she says. But when the author of autobiography Perfect Stranger found herself in a long-term r elationship with a partner who showed no real desire for children, she began to feel the impact of her biological clock. “Something inexplicable happened to me around [age] 38,” she says. “It drove me to become quite desperate for a decent father for the baby that I wanted.”

Most of what I know about this comes from personal experience, when my wife started telling me she was desperate to have a child – I was in graduate school and not yet earning the level of salary needed to support a family, as a matter of fact my wife was working and making more than me. But I had faith things would work, so we moved to a cheaper suburb away from Boston and jumped in and started our family.

You as a couple will face some challenges, strong enough to bind you together or to break you apart when it comes from deciding on the “if and when” of wanting a pregnancy. But for some folks having accurate fertility information is vital – especially when people’s fertility levels change over time or due to medical or genetic complications.

Natural Family Planning

Years ago my wife and I used the Natural Family Planning Method of tracking fertility, and that helped us realize the appropriate time to copulate in order to have a successful start of a pregnancy. Naturally, folks are getting pregnant all the time, regardless of planning. Sex happens.

“In 2011, nearly half (45% or 2.8 million) of the 6.1 million pregnancies in the United States each year were unintended”

Unwanted or unplanned pregnancies

“Natural family planning (NFP) is fertility awareness, which is simply knowledge of a couple’s fertility. It is a means of reading the body’s signs of fertility and infertility; applying this knowledge through the Sympto-Thermal Method (STM) is over 99% effective in postponing pregnancy. A married couple’s virtuous application of this knowledge either to try to achieve a pregnancy or to postpone a pregnancy is called responsible parenthood.”

With NFP you can use charts to track your temperature and other things to determine if you are fertile (women). The methods is used by pious or religious folks to learn to not have pregnancies unless they are planned. Of course, there are mistakes, and of course, some of us used NFP to get pregnant.

The Times they are a Changing

I recently saw this post on facebook, and figured I track down the information and present it to guys across the universe. There is now an app to help track fertility. Again this can help with unwanted pregnancies, and with wanted one even more. What I really like is when men show interest. Recording the data, like some scientific data collection, and you’re suddenly part of the planning and that helps to show you are interested in this thing called family.

The film titled Every Mother Counts, was produced by executive producer and founder Christy Turlington Burns. In 2010, Turlington founded Every Mother Counts, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother. Every Mother Counts informs, engages, and mobilizes new audiences to take actions and raise funds that support maternal health programs around the world.

As we have stated in our book, childbirth in America is poorly handled, and this film highlights how bad it is. As the video on CNN says, America is about the worst place in the developed world to give birth.

We agree. You have to prepare properly to overcome the birth machine to ensure the quality of your birth experience. We love to see this issue coming in the limelight.

Turlington made her directorial debut on the 2010 documentary film No Woman, No Cry. The 60 minute documentary profiles the status of maternal health and focuses on four cases: from Tanzania, Bangladesh, Guatemala, and the United States.The film made its world premiere at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival in the United States, and the U.S. television broadcast premiere aired on the new Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) on May 7, 2011. The documentary earned Turlington a nomination for the Do Something With Style Award from the VH1 Do Something Awards.

Love is a stupid affair, and can lead to people treating people better than they deserve. When people are put on too high of a pedestal they can become narcissistic and even diabolical. When our little munchkins are born, we bring them up in a world that is hard and where we have to take responsibility for our actions. Life is not handed to us on a silver platter, so why should we hand the world to our children on a silver platter. This is a very important message before you go off and raise an innocent child and they grow up to be monsters.

Trump the Entitlement King

Unless you are, of course, filthy rich, Donald-Trump’s children, then you have to make sacrifices to build a sugar feed,entitlement life for your sons and daughters. Two attitudes result: the child believing they are better than everyone else, and their believing they deserve a good life without responsibility.

The world in which we live is filled with entitlement. From welfare recipients, to prisoners, to crooks and thieves, there is a common sense that the world owes them.

To be the best parent possible, and to reduce your children from growing up entitled, think about the metaphor: no dessert before you finish your vegetables. Or like in Pink Floyd’s song Another Brick in the Wall, “If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.”

Many books have been written about parents teaching their kids to avoid the sickness of entitlement. I suppose those parents who are entitled themselves could be blamed, but lazy parenting may also be at fault. Also the whole of society teaches kids entitlement thinking so parents aren’t the only ones involved. Heck kids teach kids as well. We suggest the following book: The Entitlement-Free Child: Raising Confident and Responsible Kids in a “Me, Mine, Now!” Culture.

Nothing is worst than a spoiled child. And when that child becomes a teenager, oh my, my. So be responsible now, and learn something about how to weed out these entitlement attitudes. Be responsible and find ways on not making your sons into princes and your daughters in the princesses, or you will suffer the consequences.

For the life of me, I can’t understand what the fuss over breastfeeding in American society. Where did all these prudes come from? We are in the next millennial folks. This is not the Victorian era. Of course when women talk about their breasts, they are talking about an intimate aspects of their lives as women, such as growing up, sexuality, motherhood, breastfeeding, relationships, body image, health, cancer and ageing,” For men women’s breast are seen as an erotic symbol. Because breastfeeding produces a non-erotic exposure of the breasts, most men and women find no offense in the practice. Yet there are prudes in society that constantly complain about breastfeeding because of exposure to breasts.
But, why? If the exposed breast is so natural and non erotic, then why do these prudes lift their voices against the best and most healthy means of feeding babies and the young. And, honestly, why are they more naturally complaining about more erotically exposed breasts in swim suits, bare breasts in movies and television, red carpet events, advertising and other visual media.

Look at these snips of media:

Oscars — Red Carpet

Magazine – Sports Illustrated

Titanic — Movie

Game of Thrones — TV

If we had more exposure of breasts in non-sexual media, then the world would be a better place. More women should breastfeed in public, so that people would be used to it.
Breastfeeding is the natural way for women to give their babies the best!

Breastfeeding is almost never shown in movies. But women’s breasts are exposed in every which way in films. So you prudes out there why don’t you take on the film industry. Just for consideration, go looking for some exposed breasts in a few feature films. Just pick one from the millions of films. Here are a few examples in case you aren’t abreast of the situation!

I’ll ask you to tie my shoes when my arms are full of something I’m working and I risk the trip. Imagine my project flying across the room, stuff going everywhere.

You ask me to attend your birth for the same reasons.

After my shoe is tied, you get back to what you were doing.

Men (attending a birth) need some shoes to tie. They need some things to do.

In the kitchen cooking: the space is small. The plates cover the counter. You hips cover a third. We dance around with ladles and spoons, stirring things up. The timers ding when the ovens done, and the loaf is coming out, with the smells confirming. Dancing in the kitchen, how romantic.

Men at birth are often a hand wandering around without a pot to tend.

Give us an apron.

Dinner is fine except when at the sports bar, where your lovely form is replaced with a flat screen, and some racing athletes competing for a easily forgotten trophy. We need to find tables surrounded by beauty and not talking heads.

Men need the TV off when sitting birth, otherwise why should they be in the same room. They should go out and smoke big bulging cigars, and drink gin, pulling up their suspenders and snapping them in anticipation of their children’s arrival.

Most people want to be happy. They want to have fun. They want to experience sensations of exhilaration and triumph. If you are a hedonist, you are about your self, so please don’t have any kids. They won’t like you, and you won’t like them, after all to raise kids requires selflessness and discipline.

If you don’t want to grow up, then don’t try kids, they are too much work.

In a recent study done in Germany, the fact came out that for many having and raising kids makes them miserable.

In my humble opinion, the world would be a lot better if people who lack an understanding of what it takes to raise kids decided to stop reproducing. Planned Parenthood is all about you. Go in for family planning and learn that kids are not your thing. Planned parenthood make millions for handling abortions at its clinics. So many people are irresponsible (immature) in having unprotected sex that they will pay to get rid of their pregnancy problem by aborting the child — maybe that’s good since then they are mature enough to not conceive in the first place. Only a mature couple would actually plan on having a baby, right. The Catholics had this statement on their CNA site: “The truth of responsible parenthood and its implementation is linked with the moral maturity of the person….”

Only mature, grown up people want to take on the thankless job of raising kids, and except that their personal, sexual, financial lives will be negatively impacts. Even the wikiHow teaches people to be selfish and self absorbed. Quote “Take care of your self,” “create a routine,” and “think about what makes you happy.” This is baloney advice.

If you want purpose, you want to grow into a person of integrity, you need to learn to give of yourself to others, and nothing is more challenging then parenting, raising kids, and watching them leave the nest (eventually it does happen & if they are prepared well they leave sooner than later).

In the Parenthood Decision (Beverly Engel), the author writes “While no one can argue that many people have become more mature and responsible with the birth of a child, it certainly doesn’t guarantee it. You don’t magically turn into a mature, caring person by the act of giving birth or fathering a child.”

Having children is not about happiness really. If you are pregnant, expect to face challenges your never faced before. Don’t face them alone. Find support. Hopefully you have the father there for support, but couples often find themselves ostracized by even their own families when they are expecting. Seek out support is the best advice.

I often joke with my wife about her speaking to me as if I were part of the female species. I pitch my voice high and make Venus-sounding comments to whatever she is talking about. She may be talking about her nail color, her hair style, her new steal from the discount rack at the fashion store. It’s always comical. I’m not entirely uninterested in her self-interested circle of life, just plainly less interested in her minutia and graphic details than a woman would be. She calls me Phyllis, and we sit down have a cup of tea, and talk about family, household management, floral arrangements, and the latest cooking fad. It’s all good, but really she does need more girlfriends. I sit down with the girl and eat her crumpets and drink her Kool-Aide because I love her.

Part of our lives have been tainted by a lack of intimacy with others. Several cross-country moves, a debilitating chronic illness, long commutes to work for me, and the stress of raising a family with four kids, plus the unexpected death of our daughter, Corban, three years ago has left us feeling as a couple quite isolated. This isolation draws us closer together, but still I’m a guy, and my circuitry is wired much differently from a woman’s.Childbirth is a topic that brought us together to write Men at Birth. But what I’ve realized is that our book never really got much air time. It addresses an issue that puts men in the most awkward of places, and the psychology of that is all screwed up. See women want men to be women, and to nurture them. This is basically a failed part of men and women to know themselves. Men are not natural nurturing units. They can pantomime by giving back messages, running to get water and ice, say reassuring words, and all that bit, but they can’t become women where the internal wiring for providing childbirth support is part and parcel of their God-given mental programming.
In the book I write to men about something they can understand, and that is the importance of securing the birth location, establishing the perimeter and protecting their woman and their coming child. This is the schematic men have in their head. They are wing men at best flying close by to protect the cargo-carrying momma.
Yes humans can want to do a great deal of things that are unnatural. But asking men to be women psychologically is plainly stupid. Midwives and Doulas often tell me that they completely agree with my take on this. Women who drag their men into the birth room also reiterate this concept. They tell me how let down they were when their men didn’t perform as they desire.

“Unreasonable expectations tend to lead to great disappoints.”

When women lose perspective about men, they lose touch with reality. When men lose perspective about themselves, they too aren’t able to cope. Men need help learning what they can do during childbirth, pregnancy and the postpartum adjustment. They don’t need the detailed medical description of how bodies work in birth. Or the amazing way a woman’s brain is chemically in tune with a child’s development within her. They don’t need to be trained as pseudo nurtures. They do need to know what the consequences are of where they chose to birth the child, and how much of the medical establishment prefers for them to be ignorant of the risks involved with having their birth managed my modern technologically / invasive procedures (see the birth machine) that raise those risks. Men need to look into the results of doctors, midwives birth professionals, and the Birth Outcome Statistics of the selected birth facility to learn of their vaginal delivery and c/sec rates. They need to understand the risk of cesarean section and to do what they can to protect their mate and prevent unnecessary traumatic birth experiences. Sections are major abdominal surgery that now is so commonplace, people expect it, but often it is unnecessary and at times downright dangerous! Doctors often press to have birth’s induced to put births on their timeline, at the expense, emotionally, physically, and at times physically detrimental to both mother and child.

Some (professionals) I use that word loosely, working in childbirth tell me that men who are informed about childbirth are in the way, and that they interfere, especially in the hospital, with the “way things are done.” These Birth Machine Model caretakers would prefer men to not be involved. They would prefer for men to wait in the lobby and hand out cigars.

So I advise men to choose how they want to be involved in their childbirth. I tell them that if their woman needs support they don’t feel able to give, that they should hire that help, available through the services of a Doula. I’m not saying they can’t be at the birth, but they shouldn’t be put in a place where they will only get in the way and disappoint their mate. Men need to advocate for their partners preferences in childbirth even if that means the mother wishes to go it alone. A dialog needs to exist between the Mother and Father of the Baby where each can share their needs and preferences as they plan for the birth of their child. Our Book Men at Birth starts this dialog process with expectant couples.

Women you need to help your men to know that you don’t expect them to be women. You need to get women friends involved if you want added support. Birth is a very intimate and personal experience. Make sure you have the right support personnel at your birth.

Current Posts

Thoughts

Men who care about pregnancy and support childbirth show love to their family. These are the seeds of a great beginning. Men who want to be great dads and mates will take the time to learn their place in this most important time of life.